He ripped off his earphones. “Mouse!” he gasped without slowing down.
Emily said, “Don’t call me Mouse. You don’t have a telephone in your office?”
“I don’t even have an office anymore.”
“So I just found out, totally by accident. You resigned?”
He nodded, smiling down on her, continuing with his pantomime of a long-distance runner’s finishing kick.
“Stop that!” she shouted. “Talk to me!”
“Almost finished.”
“Goddamnit, Julian! Stop!”
He nodded in meek husbandly submission, but stopping was no simple matter. His body had been generating a lot of energy. The vibrations of the trampoline were such that he could slow down only gradually unless he wanted to be thrown off his feet. Trampolines, even small ones, were tricky. But little by little, making reassuring gestures and sympathetic faces for Emily’s benefit, he brought himself to rest. He was gasping and dripping with sweat. “I need a towel,” he said, looking toward the bathroom.
“The hell with a towel,” Emily said. “Is this true?”
His eyes rested on her at last. “Perfectly true,” he said. “I’m a free man. How would you like to fly up to the Harbor for a few days? We could take off from National at first light. Go into seclusion.” His grin was too jaunty to be genuine.
Emily ignored the question. She said, “You resigned your job, now of all moments, and I find out about it on television? From Patrick Graham?”
“Sorry. It was quite sudden. And you weren’t home when I got here last night.”
“You knew where I was, but you went to sleep without me. Why?”
“It wasn’t exactly voluntary.”
“What wasn’t? Resigning or going to sleep?”
“Either one. I saw a hawk—”
“You saw a hawk?”
He told her about sighting the red-shouldered hawk above the Ellipse. He described the meeting with Hammett, the fight with Lockwood, every nuance and detail, and about writing his letter of resignation without recapping his pen after recording the hawk in his log. “I know it seems strange, but for some reason the hawk triggered everything,” he said. “It was an irresistible impulse. I hardly knew what I was doing until after it was done. Right after that I came home—or almost right after that, I had something I had to put in motion—and when I found myself alone in the house I had a couple of drinks, and then I just couldn’t stay awake.” He shrugged apologetically. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry,” Emily said. “I can’t believe my luck. You won’t change your mind, you won’t go back?”
“After all that?” He gestured in the direction of the television sets, whose screens were now filled with commercials for laxatives, sleeping pills, breakfast cereals that preserved those who ate them from cancer, or pills that deadened trivial pains the human race had regarded as perfectly bearable for thousands of years. Hammett was right: the system was a vast scheme to defeat nature, to turn natural resources and human labor into waste, then dispose of it, recycle it, and start all over again. Now it had disposed of Julian. Into what would he be recycled? Dimly, he became aware that his wife was speaking to him.
“You bastard,” she was saying, “you don’t give a shit about me, do you? I don’t exist for you, nothing exists for you but that booby you work for and all the rest of the people in the booby hatch.”
He made as if to encircle Emily with his long arms. She darted out of reach. “Well, Mouse,” he said, “I don’t work for that booby anymore, and to be honest this isn’t the best moment to demand emotional support from me. It should be the other way around. I’m the one who just gave up everything.”
“Everything? You gave up everything? What does that make me?”
“Emily… ” He wore a look of baffled affection now, wagging his head, again reaching out for her. She didn’t believe a single word or gesture and said so. Julian sighed. “Emily, I’d do anything for you. Anything. How can you not know that?”
“You would? Assassinate an Arab? Steal an election? Throw your life away and fling your family’s name to the wolves? Would you do those things for me?”
Her words and the furious look on her face stunned him. He actually staggered backward, something she had never seen a man do before, and had never imagined that anyone as large and as invulnerable as Julian could, in fact, do. The jerky movement of his arms and shoulders released a burst of sweaty male body odor, as if from an atomizer. His eyes lost expression. He said, “I really need a towel.”
In her wrath, Emily realized that she was breathing hard. So was Julian. She felt her temperature rising, as if she might be about to break into a sweat too. Quarreling made her want to fuck—not make love, fuck.
She said, “Come here.”
Julian said, “I’m sorry, I have to get a towel.”
“Is that all you have to say to me?”
“No, I guess not. There’s more. I love you.”
“You have a funny way of showing it.”
“Sorry. In recent days our romance hasn’t exactly been the only thing on my mind.” He was angry at last, a sign of life. He said, “Now I’m going to go get a towel.”
“Oh, no you’re not.” Emily stripped off her sweatshirt and threw it in his face. “Here,” she said. “Use this.”
He looked at her naked body, so pretty and sweet, the neat breasts and bottom still a little whiter than the rest of her even all these months after the end of summer.
“My God, I do love you,” he said, in a tone of real surprise. Then, like the giant he was, he plucked her from the floor and bore her, kissing and groaning, toward the bed. And as his great ursine weight fell upon her with a brutality that made her gasp with pleasure, Julian had but a single thought in his head: Lockwood wanted to get rid of me. He has thrown me to the wolves to save himself.
6
Although she had said nothing about it to Julian—after all, he hadn’t given her much chance to do so—Emily had a lunch date that day with Zarah. It required all of her willpower to rise from the warm and pungent bed. Julian had never before made love to her with total concentration, had never, not even before they were married, let his body go entirely. Now that this had happened, the experience had been so intense, so much like a pornographic fantasy about coupling with a stranger at a party on top of the coats in somebody’s else’s bedroom, that there was something adulterous about it. Even after it was over and Julian had fallen into a deep, boyish sleep, she shuddered as if from delicious guilt at the memory of what had happened.
At lunch with Zarah Christopher in a downtown restaurant called Orlando, a home away from home for independent females, Emily displayed a hearty appetite, and as she consumed a plate of assorted smoked fish, followed by rare lamb chops with exotic vegetables, she talked and talked, as if she had been released by the change in Julian’s life from some terrible oath of secrecy and could now say whatever came into her head.
“Imagine waking up and finding out on television that your husband has told the President of the United States to go fuck himself,” she said.
“It came as a surprise?” Zarah asked.
“Complete, though God knows it’s what I always hoped for. Julian says he acted on an irresistible impulse.”
“That doesn’t sound like Julian.”
“You might even say he did it for you,” said Emily, smearing horseradish sauce on a morsel of smoked trout. “He’d just found out you were carrying messages between Lockwood and Mallory.”
“I see. And how did he find that out?”
Emily supplied the answer as casually as if Zarah had asked her what kind of fish she was eating. “Archimedes Hammett told him,” she said.
Zarah put down her fork and composed herself. Emily’s words awakened some mechanism in the primitive brain, so that she had the feeling that somebody was standing behind her, watching.
“And how,” she said, “did Archimedes Hammett happen to know this?”
“His spies are everywhere.”
“Seriously.”
“I’m perfectly serious,” Emily said. “He has this incredible fifth column of malcontents inside the government and other vital nerve centers like the media, who keep a twenty-four-hour watch on the bad guys and report back to him. Phone calls in the night, Morse code tapped out on the water pipes, microfilm in swallowed condoms. He’s like the king in the counting house, only he counts all his secrets because he cares nothing about money.”
“Hammett actually knew this? And Julian didn’t?”
Suddenly the reporter she always had been, Emily pounced. “Then it’s the truth?”
Zarah answered without hesitation. “Yes.”
“Good, I hoped it might be. Because maybe you know what Mallory’s going to do next.” She smiled, hatred visible behind the smile. “We have to plan for the future, Julian and I.”
“Lockwood would like to know that too. That’s what he wanted me to find out from Mallory.”
“And did you find out?”
“No. It made Mallory angry that Lockwood had used me as a go-between.”
“He was mad, too? Seems to be an epidemic. If he does tell you his plans, give me a call. You might as well be a double agent. It’s a family specialty.”
Emily giggled, as if she had proposed a harmless girlish prank against the men in their lives. Zarah could think of nothing to say. It never occurred to her to take offense at Emily’s words or to explain her own role as a courier, much less apologize for it. What was the use, with Emily in this mood? Zarah looked down at the untouched food on her own plate, a tepid magret de canard with bitter greens in a strange vinaigrette similar to the one she had eaten at Macalaster’s dinner party. She remembered in minute detail what Mallory had told her in the park about Julian, Horace, and Lockwood.
She said, “Do you think Julian has something to fear from Mallory?”
“According to Julian, everybody has something to fear from Mallory,” Emily replied, then changed the subject. “One thing’s for sure: now that Lockwood’s out of our life I’m going to have to find new ways to be jealous.”
Her tone was merry. To Zarah, who had grown up in the perpetual winter of her mother’s obsessive jealousy, there was nothing amusing about this emotion. “Jealous?” she said. “You?”
“You have no idea,” Emily said. “I’ve been practically insane with it since the day I met Julian. Other women don’t worry me. Julian doesn’t seem to notice them. I think they all look alike to him—he told me so once. It’s the other men you have to worry about in this town.”
“Julian?”
“No, no, you don’t understand. Sex has nothing to do with it. What men like Julian get in the Oval Office that they can’t get at home. They get to touch the king. And they’ll do anything to keep on doing it. But now at last it’s over.”
Zarah said, “You aren’t worried about the future?”
Emily looked her in the eyes. “Not worried, terrified. They’re guilty, you know, Julian and Horace both.”
“I didn’t know. I don’t think I want to know.”
“Take my word for it. They were kind enough to tell me everything, or what I thought was everything, almost as soon as they did it. I even carried messages for Horace like a good little spy and condoned the offense—after all, what’s a homicide or a stolen election among the righteous—by sleeping with Julian whenever I could trap him into it because I wanted to be pregnant. That’s why I’m so calm and healthy-minded now. I’ve had my guilt, thank you.”
Zarah said, “Emily, I don’t think you should be telling me these things.”
“Why not? You’re carrying messages, too. Welcome to the sisterhood.”
Zarah, discomfited, averted her eyes. The waitress came. Emily went right on talking. In her merry social voice, she said, “I think the Hubbards have always been a little jealous of your father because he got to go to prison for committing virtuous crimes. Now they’re going to be locked up like the heroes they are for saving the people from themselves. But not for long. It won’t be solitary confinement in Manchuria, mind you, but it will be enough to make them feel good about themselves.”
“Emily—”
Emily overrode the interruption with a dazzling smile. “It’ll probably be quite comfortable—officers’ quarters. And after Julian’s done his time, he’ll be mine, because no one else will want him ever again. All mine, maimed and blinded and helpless, like Rochester in the last chapter of Jane Eyre. Or was it Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights? I can never tell them apart.”
Zarah said, “No one can.”
Emily had been cutting into the medallion of a lamb chop; she paused, thought, frowned, smiled. “In books or life. Because they’re all crazy.” She finished cutting her meat, lifted a bright pink morsel on her fork and paused with it halfway to her mouth. “Like your friend Mallory.”
Zarah, whose eyes were still averted, looked up, meaning to say, “If you want to ask me about Mallory, it’s all right.” But she had no chance to say it because Emily suddenly began to weep. She did so soundlessly, in a ladylike manner. Tears flowed down her cheeks, her nose ran, and she made no effort to hide these signs of heartbreak. “A word of advice,” she said. “Don’t get pregnant. I did, right in the middle of everything last fall, but the baby decided not to live. They say they lie in the womb and listen to every word the grown-ups say, so my child must have been the first to know. I think that was the basis of his decision not to be born.”
7
The fact was that Julian’s resignation was not quite the impulsive action he imagined it to be. All his life he had done nearly everything by calculation, little by impulse, and by the time he got up in the dark of morning and saw his fate being wrested from him on the network news, he realized that his real purpose had been to give Lockwood an opportunity to refuse his resignation and restore him to favor. As he lay beside Emily’s sleeping form, he had even imagined the scene: the light flashing on his bedside phone, Lockwood’s voice summoning him to the cluttered Lincoln sitting room, the reconciliation, the President’s clumsy half-ashamed half-embrace, Polly’s motherly smile of contentment that all was right between Frosty and Julian again, the looks on faces along the West Wing corridors as he resumed control of events and won the day as he had done so often in the past. Then he had turned on television and was confronted by reality.
As soon as he woke from the deep slumber into which he had fallen after making love to his wife, Julian made some calls. Not to the White House—he knew they would not be returned—but to a member of the Apparatus whose lover was Jean McHenry’s assistant. This young woman’s duties included the keeping of the presidential log, a record of everyone the President saw or spoke to on the telephone. Julian might be out of power and, for all he or anyone else knew, out forever, but he still knew exactly whom to call, precisely what he wanted to know, and exactly what he wanted to do with the information.
He asked a question. Within an hour, a longer delay than should have been necessary, he had his answer. Julian’s letter, which had been put into his safe unread by the night security detail, had been discovered by his secretary when she came in at six in the morning. She walked it down to Jean McHenry, who took it upstairs to Lockwood, who immediately summoned Blackstone into his presence. Using the President’s own telephone, Blackstone had called Alfonso Olmedo C. in New York. The three-way conversation had been conducted over the speakerphone, with McHenry listening in over earphones and taking shorthand notes that her assistant later transcribed. The typist delivered a Xerox copy of this transcript to her lover over lunch in a cafeteria on Seventeenth Street, which accounted for the hour’s delay, even though Julian’s informant had read it to him over the restaurant pay phone while still eating his falafel with alfalfa sprouts in pita bread.
LOCKWOOD: He doesn’t really mean this. We had words.
OLMEDO: NO doubt you’re right. But he has done what you would have had to do sooner
or later—separated himself from you, the man he wronged, and from the presidency, the office he betrayed.
LOCKWOOD: SO what’s your advice?
OLMEDO: Accept this unsolicited gift. Announce it immediately to the press before he can call and change his mind.
LOCKWOOD: Should I call him?
OLMEDO: In my opinion that would be unwise, Mr. President.
LOCKWOOD: Remember, that boy and I spent a lot of years together.
OLMEDO: Exactly. Do not call, do not take his calls. Do not praise him or blame him to anyone except your wife. In the presence of others, say nothing about him whatsoever. Think of him as a suicide who took his secret to the grave with him.
LOCKWOOD: Jesus Christ, Alfonso! He could be one! All we need is a suicide.
OLMEDO: Mr. President, please listen to what I’m saying to you. You owe this man nothing except the trouble he has brought on you. Silence will be far more eloquent than any words you could speak.
LOCKWOOD: All right, goddamnit.
As soon as the telephone connection was broken, Blackstone had called in the press secretary and given him a photocopy of Julian’s letter of resignation for immediate release to the press. “The President has no comment about this event,” Blackstone had said. “And neither do you.” If Lockwood interfered with these instructions in any way, McHenry’s notes did not reveal it.
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